Film, Film Review

REVIEW: The Garfield Movie (2024) dir. Mark Dindal

A film as motivated as its comic strip protagonist

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The Garfield Movie is lousy. Did you expect anything else? Maybe the exact nature of its lousiness will surprise you. Opening with a shocking number of production company logos, The Garfield Movie takes away most of Garfield’s defining misanthropic traits – he’s fine with Odie, he speaks in tones other than a bored drawl, he moves with urgency, he has genuine empathy, and he doesn’t even kick Nermal when presented with the opportunity, which many of us would take. The product placement is blatant in basically every scene, even in dialogue. Tinder, Olive Garden, Zillow, Apple, and many other brands show up in this saggy animated feature that drags on until a somewhat charming climax, followed by more dragging. Mark Dindal, director of Cats Don’t Dance, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Chicken Little (a real up and down here…), does what he can with expressive, cartoonish animation, but there’s only so much imagination one can muster during something like this. Hope the kids want to see Garfield confront his abandonment issues!

A Garfield in name only (Chris Pratt, a better Garfield than a Mario, but that’s not praise) lives a charmed life with his owner Jon (Nicholas Hoult, for some reason) and a dog named Odie (barking noises provided by Harvey Guillen… no comment!). Garfield spends his days ordering takeout by drone, watching TV, and sleeping, until he and Odie get caught up in a milk-based heist perpetrated by a pompous white cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) cooked up to get revenge on Garfield’s absentee father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson – is Garfield biracial?). Garfield and Vic scrap a bit on their way to the farm they’re meant to rob, but a melancholy bull named Otto (Ving Rhames) helps them get along. This is where the film really lingers far too long and could easily lose ten minutes, if you couldn’t tell. I’m hard pressed to think of why we should care about Garfield’s dad, but I guess I went to this movie to find out.

Vic, Garfield, Odie and Otto in GARFIELD.

The benefits of being famous have fallen so far – you do five years of SNL, now you get to be in The Garfield Movie. Bowen Yang and Brett Goldstein do what they can as Jinx’s dog lackeys, but there’s a real laziness to everything on display here. Even creating a Garfield who has motivation does not solve the bloat. Quick example of the incompetence on display: Early on, Jinx angrily eats her bird lackey as a show of intimidation. You’d think she would spit him up when defeated at the end of the film but nope, he’s dead. Fun! Off-putting! At least there’s a Lyman Easter egg for the real Garfield comic strip heads.

At the end of the day, The Garfield Movie gave me the opportunity to experience one of my favorite things: hearing the Mission: Impossible theme in a theater. They do the Top Gun theme too, and reference Tom Cruise by name. The animated film landscape is in a weird place, and it’ll only get weirder if slop like this succeeds and talented animators are kicked off the ladder by greedy corporations, which they always are. Fix it, someone! Please!

The Garfield Movie
2024
Dir. Mark Dindal
104 min

Don’t worry about it! Go see Furiosa!

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